There were no bat boys, no closers, no steroids. Heck, home plate had just been invented, and the players didn’t even wear gloves.
But the first game of organized, modern baseball took place in Hoboken in 1873, according to many accounts.
On Saturday, June 19, the Hoboken Historical Museum invites mile-square residents to see what baseball was like in the mid-19th century.
The museum will present a re-creation of the first recorded game of organized baseball, which took place at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields between the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York and the New York Base Ball Club, or the New York Nine.
“The biggest difference is that we’re wearing no gloves.” – Brad Shaw
________
The re-creation will take place at Stevens Institute of Technology’s Dobbelaar Field at 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 19, the 164th anniversary of the first recorded game.
Admission is free and hot dogs and commemorative t-shirts will be available for purchase.
The first game
Baseball existed in different forms before a set of universal rules was laid out by Alexander Joy Cartwright and adopted around the time of the first match in Hoboken.
Organized baseball, in its first incarnation, was played by “lawyers, doctors, merchants, brokers and bank and insurance clerks – in effect the Yuppies of the day,” Hoboken resident Nicholas Acocella wrote in his 1996 museum chapbook, “Hoboken, Alexander Cartwright, and the Beginnings of Baseball.”
In the original game in Hoboken, the New York Nine defeated the Knickerbockers, 23-1.
The re-creation teams will play a competitive game, not a strict re-creation, but will use the bygone rules of the mid-19th Century, like “soaking,” or throwing the ball directly at a base runner for an out.
According to the rules at the time, pitchers throw underhand 45 feet away from home plate.
It takes three balls for a walk, three strikes for an out, and the first pitch to each batter is not called one way or the other.
Also, the batter, or “striker,” can request that the pitcher throw high or low strikes.
Among other differences, foul balls do not count as strikes and can be caught on one bounce for an out.
Barehanded catch
Brad “Brooklyn” Shaw, founder of the Flemington club, will give a brief history of the game before the re-creation on Saturday, and will announce the game and its interesting details as it is played.
“[The Hoboken game] was the first game that got some attention in the papers, and for some reason we go back to that event as the first game of modern baseball,” Shaw said last week.
“They probably played in October [the year prior without documentation]. They had been playing a game similar to that game for a few years [in New York City],” he said of the history.
He has been doing baseball re-creations for 10 years, since reading about the games in Smithsonian Magazine.
“Considering I’m a history guy and a baseball guy, this was the greatest thing in the whole world,” he said.
He played one year with his upcoming opponents, the Elizabeth Resolutes, the oldest throwback team of its kind in New Jersey.
The next year, Shaw started the Neshanocks based on a historic Flemington team that played in 1866.
“The biggest difference is that we’re wearing no gloves,” he said. “The ball is specially made.”
It looks like modern baseball with black stitching, he said, but it is “75 percent as hard as a regular hard ball.”
“It has some give to it,” he said. “Does it sting a little bit? Oh yeah. You get used to it.”
For more information on the free event, call the Hoboken Historical Museum at (201) 656-2240.
Timothy J. Carroll may be reached at tcarroll@hudsonreporter.com.